Arthub Favorite: Week 113

Dive Bomber

Duration: 2018 August 4 – September 16
Venue: Antenna Space, NO.50 Moganshan Road

Antenna Space will present artist Wang Shang’s first solo exhibition in Antenna from August 4 to September 16. The exhibition is titled “Dive Bomber”, with a slighted twisted Chinese title, which could be translated as “Would still like to tumble in a thousand waves” as a detournement of the lyrics of the song “The Bund”.

About the Exhibition

Wang Shang’s practice is based on his art creation and the value the produced by it. With a critical aspect, he compares them with the creature by geological history to its value. Wang Shang regards the nature as a being without a purpose, which means to view from a bigger scale, the civilazaiton created by human and the value that constructed by their history will be eventually seen as meaningless. Even though from a perspective by human being, that the nature is “ruthless and meaningless”, Wang Shang still chooses to celebrate human’s creation, and insists on this creation. So in his early career on jewelry design—a miniature scale of sculpture on wearable stones and metals—then he shifted his creation in as what art system called “sculpture”—to blend geological production and phenomena, human civilization, artist’s individual interference and annotation together, and formed monumental beings, and engaged them into contemporary art display, circulation, and value system. His practice in this aspect also includes a set of paintings as a result of his comparison and annotation on geological phenomena and human civilization.

His interests in value also has expedited his own examination on his work or “labor” and the value they have produced. His jump rope series took body movement—as artist used his body to work—as the creative motivation for aesthetic value and economic value. His paintings of jewelry took greater scale of fine labor—as a comparison of earth’s billions year of geological movement that produced rare minerals—to produce values.

Given the nihilistic fact, yet the artist has kept on working and creating objects and construct their value, Wang Shang’s work almost has a “useless effort” or “in vain” result in a certain level. But he chose to keep working on it and criticize, examine and test the value produced by art. In a rather romantic way, this is what the deceased Hong Kong song writer once had written in the song “The Bund”: Would still like to tumble in a thousand waves.